


Does anyone actually like fruit cake?

by Spayne



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27421906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spayne/pseuds/Spayne
Summary: Where Villanelle celebrates her birthday.(Four months early)
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 142
Kudos: 264





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly- nice one America. Really though. Hopefully this fic finds you hung over, or maybe even still drunk. Nice one either way.
> 
> Anyway, back to this bit of birthday fluff. 
> 
> A small mention of V’s mean mum but nothing too awful. Beyond that this is another fluffy outing.

Today is the 8th November, it is also your birthday. Well. It isnt. Not really. Or maybe it is now. Depends on your perspective you suppose. It has been your birthday for the last two years at least.

It’s your own fault really, you could have said something at the time, but honestly you were so wrong footed by the simple fact that she was there in the first place that it never really occurred to you that you might correct her.

She left you on the bridge, or you left her, it doesn’t really matter now. But you turned and you walked, you looked back and she was gone. You walked to a hotel, you cried and you slept. You woke and you got on a plane. You traveled for months. You occasionally fucked other women, one that looked like her and the rest that didn’t. You fucked a man to ring the changes. You killed someone just to see if you still could. You got your answer. You got bored, you missed her, you missed Paris. You went back and bought an apartment. Not the same one as before. You bought a tortoise from Gumtree. His name is Thibaut. He eats a lot of salad and sleeps in a box in your cupboard during the winter. You watched movies and read books. You learnt Korean to a reasonable standard. You imagined how she might sound speaking it. You perfected making gnocchi . You learned to enjoy the quiet. You learned how to stay in one place. Surprisingly, you were actually ok.

Then one evening she knocked on the door.

She looked the same. Older maybe, more tired certainly. You wanted to smile but you didn’t.

She said she’d been thinking about you, that she’d never stopped. You forced your face to remain impassive but showed her in and took her coat. You sat next to her on the sofa. She put a hand on your knee and you blinked back tears.

She kissed your face and called you sweetheart. You fucked her roughly on the wooden floor, uncomfortable and, in hindsight, tone deaf. One mistake among many that you wish you could undo. All of it born of a fear that if you let yourself stroke and caress instead of claw and scratch that it would somehow hurt more when she left. 

It was a mistake she didn’t make herself when later she made love to you gently in your bed. Its often been the case since that day that she would take a leap where you wouldn't. She collapsed on top of you afterwards, her still wet face pressed into the skin on your stomach which rumbled empty beneath her. She looked up and grinned. 

Your cupboards were a disappointment, you had enough for two bowls of cereal, the chocolate kind, she called you a teenager and you ate them together in bed just before midnight. You scraped the bowl and she raised an eyebrow.

“Hungry?” She asked.

“What?” You responded.

Your body is all muscle, you explained, and you need food to maintain it. She pinched some of the new softer skin at your waist, the price of comfortable living probably. You sulked until she kissed you, she called you vain and she called you beautiful. 

You forced yourself to keep the words in. 

That’s when it happened. 

She slipped her t shirt back on and padded out to the living room. A mop of hair and slim legs, an image burned into the coils of your memory, there to stay regardless of when this eventually ends. You listened to the reassuring creak of the floor boards, proof that this was real, not a cruel trick of your subconscious. She came back with a battered box in her hands and put it in your lap.

A birthday cake.

It wasn’t your birthday. 

It was a shitty looking birthday cake too. Store bought from Tesco. The icing too flat, too manufactured. ‘Happy Birthday’ in bright red letters. You read the label, it was a fruit cake. Jesus. Does anyone actually like fruit cake? Even now you aren’t sure whether she does. You looked up ready to tease, she looked shy, hopeful and as lacking in artifice as you’ve ever seen.

She apologised that it wasn’t something better, said that she was in a rush to get the Eurostar and bought the first cake she found.

You thought about the last few hours with her, the months without and the years before you knew her. All of it leading here, to this moment where she had found you again. She’d kissed you, fucked you so sweetly and brought you a shitty birthday cake on the wrong day. You wondered if that’s how love looked on her; a well intentioned after thought. Well. Yours looks like a bullet in the shoulder so you can’t really complain.

You ate two slices of her horrible cake, and told her it was the best birthday you’d ever had. She looked surprised and then pleased. You kissed her and she stayed.

March 12th came and went without acknowledgement. You don’t even remember what you did that day. You do remember that years ago, on one March 12th, your Mother locked you outside for three hours in the freezing rain then slapped your face when you shouted at her after Pyotr finally let you in. On another, a prison guard dislocated one of your fingers. They weren’t all bad, for some you were alone and on one Anna kissed you so softly you can still almost convince yourself it really was love that she felt. Either way though, hardly a date worth celebrating.

More months followed, a whole year that she stayed. It won’t last forever of course but you’ll enjoy it for as long as you are able. She says the words with a freedom you never expected and you mostly believe her. She works from the flat that you both now share, her laptop and files fill the kitchen table more often than not, and you watch how other killers come and go. You tell her how dull their work is, how lacking in imagination and vim. She smiles indulgently and calls you jealous. You pout until she proves that it's still you that she can’t stop looking at. She promises that she’ll never stop, sometimes you even believe that too.

November 8th came round again and she was still here. She produced the same shitty cake as last time. You later found out that she went back to London to buy it whilst you were out getting your hair done the week before. 

So you spent the day in bed eating dry fruit cake and bowls of cereal. She told you she loved you as she had done so many times in the year since she came back to you, but that second November 8th was the first time since Rome you said it back. She looked at you, smiled, and told you that she’d always known , even back then, regardless of whether she’d wanted to hear it or not. 

Another perfect wrong birthday.

You’ll never tell her that you had another birthday in a life before this. What would be the point? It’s just how her love works. She got your birthday wrong that first time, she almost never remembers how you like your coffee, she doesn’t remember to give Thibaut his medicine with his afternoon cucumber sticks. Her love is flawed and annoyingly imprecise at times but she’s still here, and you treasure it like nothing else.

Today when you reach your front door, after an appointment at the nail salon, you pause before you use your key.

You imagine a box, battered and Tesco branded. You imagine her face teasing and indulgent. Finally you imagine opening the door and feeling something as ordinary as happiness.

As it turns out she presents you with a half burned fruit cake, home made this time with her scrawled handwriting in icing on the top; ‘happy birthday’.  No caps. 

She’s covered in flour, and flushed from the effort. An open bottle of wine on the counter. Almost every pan seems to have been used. Your chest aches. You feel the pinch in your cheeks from your smile, broad and genuine. 

A badly baked, horrible cake on your not birthday. Not quite what you expected, but with her so few things are.

You place the cake back on the counter, and wrap yourself around her. She smells of dough. You squeeze her tighter.

“Happy birthday, baby.” She whispers in your ear.

“Best birthday ever.” You whisper back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is for mini spayne who is 3 today. She is getting cute little cupcakes with animal faces on because, unlike Eve I will not be slaving over a stove— my love looks more like pre ordered party food from Waitrose.
> 
> Regardless let’s wish her well and hope she never has to know this fic, or my secret identity exists, no one needs to know this much about their parents.
> 
> I still exist on twitter, its mostly me plugging other people's fic and complaining about having to write my own but if that's your thing do come and say hi - @spayne_fic


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is only one person to blame for Eve's decent into softness.....stupid sexy Villanelle.

You’ve done a lot of pretending over the course of your life. Some of it to satisfy other people’s expectations and some of it to satisfy your own. Years of piano lessons that you pretended to enjoy for the sake of your Mother. Years of insisting that you didn’t chafe at the edges of the normal life you had wedged yourself into for you own.

You didn’t call it pretending back then, you called it compromise. Compromise sounded mature and grown up where pretending sounds calculated and dishonest. Both things that didn’t fit within the acceptable narrative of your polite little life, your nice little house, your nice husband. You had both compromised to make a marriage work, how nice.

It changed with her, but what didn’t? She was the first person who didn’t want you to pretend, she didn’t want you to compromise, and it felt like icy air in your face after too long inside.

It took you a long time to accept that feeling for what it was. You preferred the softly spoken slips of truth tossed out in the space before Rome to be manipulative rather than intimate. It was easier if her ill timed declarations of love were empty rather than inexperienced, ham fisted but also genuine. So when it came to the bridge it was second nature for you to pretend. It was the end. It was nice and neat and finished.

Then you kept on pretending. You pretended to be fascinated by killers who just placed silenced barrels to the back of a head before slipping back out into nothing. You pretended not to feel the old familiar press of claustrophobia when you signed a two year lease on a flat. You pretended that when your fingers knotted into another woman’s hair you weren’t desperately picturing long blonde tresses that you had only seen down once.

Then one day it was too much. You knew where she was, you’d always known. You told Carolyn it was a good idea to keep tabs on where she was, just in case, and you took her silence and raised eyebrow as enthusiastic consent. So you’d always known and you’d been watching. Nothing new there and whilst you had watched her flit through South America and gradually back through Europe, you sat at your desk and pretended it was fine.

Until one day it wasn’t. There was nothing particular that prompted it. Pretending was just suddenly not enough.

So you bought a Eurostar ticket from your desk and printed it at work. Then on the way to St Pancras it occurred to you that you probably broke her heart on the bridge and it might be a bit shit to turn up unannounced and empty handed. You went into the nearest Tesco and in a rush bought that stupid cake. Your mother would be proud of your manners if nothing else.

You knocked on the door and promised yourself no more pretending. You want her, so you’ll have her. You love her, so you’ll tell her. No more pretending.

The irony of it all is not lost on you as your fingers still ache from hand mixing the dough. What sort of hell dimension spawned a cake that you aren’t able to make in a mixer?

You hate fruit cake. You say it out loud to the empty apartment. It’s stodgy and bitter and dried fruit is gross at the best of times. You’re pretty sure she hates it too.

But you both pretend anyway.

You blame her face for this friends gag of a farce. Her stupid lovely face. You didn’t even realise that the first cake had Happy Birthday written on it until she’d pulled it from the box. Best birthday ever, she’d said and her stupid lovely face was just so— touched. She was touched that you cared enough to try to do something for her even if she thought that you’d got the date wrong.

It’s probably a reflection of her low expectations and your careless treatment of her in the past but whatever the reason she was touched. There is still a part of you even now that doesn’t like to let her have the upper hand, doesn’t like when she catches you in a mistake, but in that moment you didn’t want to take this from her.   
  


You could have corrected her, proved to her that you know when her birthday is, and that this was a mistake of absent mindedness not a reflection of your attention to her details. But what would be the point?

She saw love in your rushed purchase of a shitty cake and really she wasn’t wrong. You do love her, and you did when you rushed to get the Eurostar. You did for an indeterminate amount of time before that. So when she looked up at you with that stupid lovely face you pretended, and it felt good.

It didn’t feel like the pretending from before. Pretending had always been a way to cut yourself down to a more acceptable shape, a sacrifice to be made, this pretending felt like a gift to be given.

So you had smiled graciously, eaten the rubbish cake and enjoyed her happiness. If it takes that last little bit of pretending to make her happy then you’ll enthusiastically pick through crappy cake after crappy cake to do it.

This one will be the third. It sits half burnt on the counter. What possessed you to bake this time you couldn’t say, but two hours later and here it is. It looks shit, and will probably taste worse.

The icing is a particular low light. Does happy birthday have capitals? Has your hand writing always been this scratchy?

It probably wont matter though, she likes observing little traditions like this. Despite appearances she’s a surprising creature of habit, taking comfort in familiarity where you thought she would just be bored. So last time you bought the stupid cake for her stupid fake birthday, and this time you baked. Then soon you will both pretend and perhaps the unlikeliest part of all this is that you will both be kind of happy about it.

You’re both kind of happy about a lot of things actually. You never really pictured happiness as part of all your imaginings of a life with her. Its probably a sign of how deeply screwed up you are that you threw away your comfortable little life for one you didn’t even think you’d be happy in but here you are, and you are actually kind of happy.

Huh. Who’d have thought it.

You hear the key in the lock and you pick up the cake in anticipation. Jesus. It really is terrible. Maybe next time you will just go back to London to buy it.

  
But then she’s there in front of you, all stifled amusement and raised eyebrows. She takes the cake from your hands and sets it aside before folding you into her arms. You know what comes next, she suddenly holds you slightly tighter. A creature of habit. You know the words she wants and you give them to her.

“Happy birthday, baby.”

When she responds you hear the smile in her voice.

“Best birthday ever.”

Your chest tightens and you run your nose along the line of her jaw. A familiar gesture now and she anticipates it as you’d expect, she turns her face down to press a kiss to your waiting mouth.

Then one final kiss before she pulls back with a grin.

She wields the knife, a theatrical flourish, she cuts the cake and makes all the right noises as she eats.

So yeah, you’ve done a lot of pretending in your life, and maybe you should have recognised this for what it is much sooner. Yes, it’s a crap cake on the wrong day. But its also her, treasuring your slightly shabby attempt at love, and its you, loving her back enough to let her. Thinking about it like that, it can be both of those things, and maybe it has never been about pretending at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So thats it - a little bit of fluff.
> 
> The next thing on the radar is Adri's trope story. Its six chapters of tropey nonsense in the run up to her birthday, so look forward to that or dread it depending on how you feel about classics such as - trapped in a small space and only one bed. 
> 
> Anyway. Thanks for reading this, I hope it brightened up a few people's days.


End file.
